3/29/2020 What's behind prejudice?

FEATURE

What's behind prejudice?

People's emotions may better predict intolerant behavior
toward certain groups than can stereotypes, according to a
social psychologist's research.
By JAMIE CHAMBERLIN
Monitor Staff
October 2004, Vol 35, No. 9
Print version: page 34

While most research on prejudice has focused on how people's negative stereotypes contribute
to intolerance, new research by Princeton University's Susan Fiske, PhD, indicates that emotions
such as pity, envy, disgust and pride may play a bigger role. In fact, according to Fiske's research-
-conducted with Princeton doctoral student Amy Cuddy and Lawrence University psychologist
Peter Glick, PhD--these emotions appear tied not only to people's prejudicial ideas about social,
cultural and religious "outgroups" they don't belong to but also to discriminatory behavior--an
important, but often overlooked aspect of prejudice, said Fiske during an APA Board of Scientific
Affairs Master Lecture at APA's Annual Convention in Honolulu.
"It's not illegal to have a bad thought or feeling in your head," said Fiske. "What really matters is
the behavior."
And the types discriminatory behavior prejudice can spur include excluding and harming others,
Fiske said. She and her colleagues have also found evidence that emotional prejudices of pity,
envy, disgust and pride exist across cultures and, through neuroimaging studies, that these four
emotions may activate distinct parts of the brain.
Why emotions?
Fiske began her research on emotions and prejudice with a metaanalysis of 57 studies--done
over 50 years--on attitude behavior and racial bias. With former Princeton student Cara Talaska
and New York University professor Shelly Chaiken, PhD, she found that emotions predict
behaviors more than twice as well as negative stereotypes.
To better establish how emotions figure into discrimination, Fiske, Cuddy and Glick put together a
study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 82, No. 6), to determine
how people sort sociocultural groups into categories and what emotions those groupings bring
forth. They surveyed both students and nonstudents and found that people tend to rate groups

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along two primary dimensions: warmth, or whether the group is friendly, trustworthy or sincere;
and competence, or whether the group is skillful and capable. In turn, these ratings are
associated with one of four emotions: disgust, pity, pride and envy.
For example, people rate groups such as homeless people, drug addicts and poor people low on
both warmth and competence, prompting them to feel disgust. In contrast, they rate elderly
people, along with the disabled and developmentally challenged, high on warmth but low on
competence, prompting them to feel pity. People tend to rate middle-class people, whites and
Americans high on both warmth and competence, prompting them to feel "pride," or what Fiske
calls feelings of "ingroup" or "reference group" warmth and affiliation. And, finally, people tend to
rate those who are rich, Jewish or Asian low on warmth and high on competence, prompting
them to feel envy.
The same patterns emerged in a separate survey whose U.S. sample was 77 percent white, 6
percent black and 9 percent Hispanic. Fiske and her colleagues asked participants to rate
behaviors, such as "harm," "cooperation," "help and protection" and "affiliation," for each of the
four sociocultural groupings that had elicited pity, pride, disgust and envy.
They found that those in the disgust category prompted feelings of both active and passive
"harm," while pride-inducing groups receive both "cooperate" and "protect," but no feelings of
harm. The pity groups get "helped and protected," but also socially excluded and neglected,
Fiske noted, while the envy groups prompt a disturbing mix of "harm" and "affiliation."

"They get cooperated with and associated with, because they are high status and they have
resources that other people have to have," she explained. "But when the chips are down, they
get attacked."

"I personally think that this is a model of genocide," she added. "Many of the groups who have
been subject to mass killings or genocide are groups who were once seen as entrepreneurs but
perceived as outsiders."
Prejudice across cultures

Once Fiske and her colleagues had shown this relationship between emotions and behaviors in
groups of Americans, they wanted to see whether these links would hold true in cultures known
for modesty and humility, such as Asian ones.
"If you don't have these norms of saying 'I'm the greatest,'" she said, "then maybe you don't have
a norm saying 'we're the greatest' and so maybe you won't have the same kind of outgroup
derogation, because you don't have the same kind of ingroup love."

Their data showed that people in European countries categorized groups the same way the
Americans in her original studies did. However, data gleaned from three Asian samples in Japan,
Korea and Hong Kong showed a remarkable difference, she noted.
For the most part, participants sorted the groups similarly to American participants, for example,
assigning disgust to the homeless and envy to the rich. However, none of the groups fell under
the "pride" category. That is to say, feelings of ingroup warmth were missing, Fiske said.

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"So the answer is that this is both universal and culture-bound," says Fiske. "It suggests that you
can have outgroup derogation without ingroup love prejudice."
Emotions on the brain

Fiske's latest round of research, with Princeton doctoral student Lasana Harris, is examining
whether pity, disgust, envy and pride activate distinct neural regions of the brain. Using functional
magnetic resonance imaging, Fiske and Harris measured the brain activity of 12 participants as
they categorized 24 pictures of people, animals and objects meant to be associated with the four
emotions.
So far, they've found that "differentiated prejudices appear to lead to differentiated activations,"
Fiske said. These brain activations add to evidence from verbal reports that emotional prejudices
reside in particular brain regions and suggest that these reactions are immediate and not
necessarily conscious, she explained.
"We are getting different patterns of response, but what we need now is to have multiple
replications," she added. "But it's promising."

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